


Something Beautiful

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: F/M, First Time, Fluff, Genderswitch, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-15
Updated: 2009-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 10:02:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's her favourite toy and she doesn't want anyone but herself to break him. Diverges from canon, but it's a mafia Mello and an SPK girl!Near.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> Genderswitch ahoy!

"It wouldn't kill you to smile, you know," he says, draping his arms over her shoulders and studying his own face, reflected back at him, from the shiny surface of the silver cardboard she's busy cutting into strips for her latest project.

Nia doesn't start at his touch, because she'd sensed him the moment he'd entered the room, though the weight of his arms makes her insides shift warmly. She doesn't say _hello_, either, but simply huffs to herself instead. "What did you promise Halle this time?" she asks, and he's not to know that she's given blanket orders for her agents to let him in whenever he wants to be let in; besides, it's true that Mello has the blonde agent wrapped around his little finger. Nia isn't particularly jealous, because she has the ego to know that he can't seriously look at another woman any more, not since she has begun to look at him herself - she has the ego required to know what it is that she does to him, and she knows that that's why he comes to her like this, with the frequency that he does. Of course it almost always ends in arguments, and usually he sprawls on the couch with his legs flung open like a taunt or an invitation; usually she doesn't let him touch her. She always lets him look, though, and if she's obtained pyjamas with a finer weave so that he can see hints of the slender curves her tiny body is made from, whenever she moves, she'd never admit that to anyone but herself; truth is, though, she _like_s the unsettling heat of his gaze upon her. But, no, she's never let him touch, and she is more than capable of pushing him away with a simple twist and kick... except that she's been thinking, recently. Thinking about a lot of things.

She can hear him thinking too, now, his thoughts whirring loudly inside that head of his, hovering just behind hers. She knows that, as the seconds draw into minutes, and she remains sitting here with his warm skin against hers, he's starting to question what the catch is. Because Mello is something beautiful, but he's something beautiful with lashings of the cynic.

Nia puts her scissors down, ever so carefully, as if they were a deadly weapon - certainly, the potential can be found in them, when she holds them in her hands - and she turns her head to look at him. "I do smile," she answers calmly. "But only when I have a reason to."

"You're alive," Mello says, his words breathing warmth against the side of her head. "That's reason enough, isn't it?"

He's undressing her with his eyes, like he always does, and his thumbs have grown bold against the uppermost button of her pyjama shirt. She wants to shiver when the soft-rough skin of one of his fingers slopes over her right collarbone; inside, she feels a thrill of panic at her own reaction - but she's the one who started this game, and she needs to be the one who wins it.

So she raises her eyebrows beneath her mess of hair, and she shifts herself in his arms, so that's she's facing him, and one of her knees is keeping them apart. For a man who deceives and misleads for a living, he's terrible at hiding his reactions from her, and she reads his surprise at her movement, written bright in his eyes as they study at her.

Nia raises a hand to her hair, twirls, and observes, "I find it slightly unexpected that you, of all people, should sound like the inside of a greeting card, Mihael."

Oh, and there she has it, she can see it in the way his mouth moves of its own accord - she's gained the upper hand again, by way of using his name. He stares at her and she curves her lips into a smirk, not a smile. She shoves at his chest so that he has to let go of her and put his hands out behind him, to stop himself from landing on his back upon the rug. He blinks, and swears. She murmurs, "I didn't know that you considered my being alive as being worthy of a smile..."

He takes back control of his face, and he frowns, and he sneers, and he says words that she ignores, and she curls her tiny fists against the leather of his vest.

Because, deep down, Nia has been thinking, and Nia knows that he really _does _care whether she lives or she dies, and Nia knows that she feels the same way about him, and he's her favourite toy, and she doesn't want him broken by anyone but her - and the only way to keep him safe is to keep him at her side - and the only way to keep him at her side is to make him hers - and the only way to make him hers is to win this other game, this other game that they've been playing since before she'd known what it was. And the game's a gamble, as she crawls closer to him, crawls between his knees and then straddles his lap, because she might have no experience in this particular game herself, but she does know that it hangs by silver threads... and she also knows that, once he's had her, that might be the end of it. Which is why she has to keep control, she thinks, though she knows, as she pushes him properly onto his back, moving her hips so as to fall with him but stay upright while he's laying, that control is a two-way street and, right now, he's the one letting her do whatever she wants.

"You're not saying anything," she remarks, as she looks at him beneath her, wondering if she's too heavy, though he doesn't seem to think so, not with the way he's gazing up at her.

It's his turn to raise his eyebrows. He brushes his hair from his face, as though to look at her better, and shrugs against the rug. "Right now I'm just... wondering whether you actually know what you're doing, Nia. You're playing with fire, girl."

Nia glares at him before she can stop herself, but she knows better than to answer that. Instead, she takes her hand from her hair, and unbuttons her shirt, one button at a time, ever so slowly, and she hopes it looks like she's trying to be seductive, or something, when in reality it's more that she's having trouble making her fingers do what she's instructing them to do. She can feel her cheeks going pink and she wants to stare off into a corner, but she makes her eyes stay on his, as she reaches the last button and reveals her small, white breasts beneath the cotton, with their pale pink nipples already taut from anticipation and nerves.

Mello stops sneering then and his face tells her that he likes what he sees, and the way that his hips shift slightly beneath her makes her own skin run hot and cold all at once, the fine hairs on her neck rising with a fear that's flushed with pleasure. Mello has stared at her a lot, in the past, Mello has done wicked things to her inside his mind, and she's seen it in his eyes, but she's never seen him looking at her_ that_, bare and open and as if... as if_ she_ were the one who were something beautiful. She's finding it hard to breathe steadily, and she keeps losing track of her hands, only to find them again upon his bare chest, his vest zipper pulled down and one of her fingers touching curiously at his strange little man nipples, while he just keeps on looking at her like... like _that_. And Nia thinks, as he closes his eyes briefly and grants her a reprieve, while he reaches his hands out to place them upon the slight curve of her waist, beneath her open shirt, so softly as if she were made of hand blown glass, that she's never seen anything more deadly than that hungry worship in his eyes. She bites back a little staccato moan that she hadn't meant him to hear, at the feel of those fingers of his, stroking up along her sides, so warm and steady. And the look on his face is back, the minute his lashes part, and it's all pain and amazement and disbelief and_ wanting_ and something else that she can't quite explain, and it makes her hope with an almost agonising desperation that she was right when she'd planned this, right, _ right_\---

\---and when Nia settles down against his chest, afterwards, sorer than she had thought she would be, but also more pleased than she had imagined, she's so warm and so damp and so softly content that she's almost forgotten the whys and the wherefores of how come she'd started this in the first place. She remembers, though, when he strokes a strong hand up the middle of her back, and breathes against her, warmly, his face softer than she's ever seen it, even beneath that scar, which is now familiar to her very lips.

He says, "You're smiling..."

And Nia meets his gaze, and she knows that she's saved him, because from now on he will compete _at her side_, him against her, yes, because they like it that way, but the pair of them against the world. She ducks her face slightly, and smiles against his warm, warm skin, and knows that she can keep him whole.... and that he can make her into something altogether new.

It's only when he puts both his hands on her, and rolls her over, so that she's the one with her back to the carpet - only when he leans in to kiss her, lingering and _just like that_ \- that Nia realises that he's thinking exactly the same thing.


End file.
